Chapter 8
C onnor
Afternoon turned to night, and I’d exhausted all the places I suspected Riordan might be. He had a girlfriend, Moniqua, whose cousin had been in the Four Milers, but that dude was dead as a doornail. Her apartment was empty when I checked it.
The last place I tried was the home Riordan shared with his da and sister, before Arran moved her into his, but coming here would end the secret I was keeping from them.
With no other choice, I knocked on the door.
An older man answered the communal street door, his eyes bleary and his jowls unshaven. “Who the hell are you?”
“Is your son here?”
“Who?”
“Riordan.”
The man spat, rolling on his feet. “That kid? Waste of fucking space.”
“Have ye seen him?”
He was steaming drunk and it was barely dark.
“After all I did for him, taking him in, and all the space he took up, I asked one thing in return. Trade in that bike he rides. He has a goddamned car, does he need both? Do you know what he said?”
I inched back from a hot waft of alcohol fumes. “What?”
“He said no. No! He has a full-time job, and I need the cash. Ungrateful, overgrown bastard.”
A strange pang of sympathy struck me. Riordan’s da wanted him to sell his bike to no doubt fuel his drunkenness. This guy bore a resemblance to the woman who’d had the misfortune to give birth to me. He didn’t care about him like my mother didn’t want me.
We had that in common.
The sentiment was short-lived.
I turned on my heel and stalked away, setting my tracks for the warehouse. The day was a fucking bust. For the next several hours, I worked security. Sunday nights were quieter but not dead. We had to shut up shop earlier because of licensing laws, but that was only the public-facing parts of the business.
The rest remained open until well into the early hours. The brothel, and the women and men who performed over live streams for paying customers. That was busy enough on a Sunday evening to keep me occupied.
I had another activity that was unique to me, the centre of my role in Deadwater, but nothing of that was possible tonight.
My knives stayed sheathed, and it was more the fucking pity because taking out my mood on deserving flesh would’ve helped me no end.
But no matter how much I took on, the draw to my apartment only got stronger as the evening continued. All I imagined was Everly. Stuck inside. Waiting for me. Or maybe not caring and just getting on with her precious work.
At midnight, I gave up my resistance and ran up the eight flights to the penthouse floor. Silently, I let myself into my apartment. All was quiet. A lamp had been left on, and I had the weird idea it was for my benefit, but I stopped that thought in its tracks and continued on.
In the bedroom, Everly slept in my bed. She was on her back, her long, brunette hair spread out over my pillow, and the sheets lightly draped over her form.
She took a breath, shifting in her sleep so the sheet moved and clung to the shape of her chest.
My dick thickened in my jeans. I’d spent the night around semi-naked women and watched people fuck, but it hadn’t triggered even the smallest degree of interest. Naked bodies were hot. Dicks disappearing into holes used to do something for me. But it was too commonplace to affect me anymore. I knew and respected the sex workers involved so didn’t fetishise them.
It took a lot to turn me on, yet the outline of this sleeping woman’s tits had caught me by the balls.
I pressed my spine to the wall, my chest rising and falling. Earlier, I’d told her she could do anything she wanted to me in my sleep, and she’d said the same.
Those words, gifted with a smile, haunted me.
Everything she did haunted me. The day my mother escaped her father wasn’t even two years from when we’d moved in. I’d been so relieved. So desperate for the nightmare of living in that house to be over.
With her gone, that left just me and Everly. My perfect, beautiful seventeen-year-old girlfriend. It was our turn to walk out the door, and I’d worked my arse off to prepare. I had a car. A job in another city, low-paying work in a bar but better than nothing and enough to rent us a room in a shared house.
The week leading up to the big day had been hellish. Mayor Makepeace was easy with his fists. He’d begun knocking my mother around only months after we’d moved in, though I didn’t know for a long time after. I heard the arguments, though. He liked control and saw offence in the smallest things. A glass left on the coffee table was reason for a screaming match.
The side problem was my mother’s previous relationship had been just as shitty. That boyfriend had taken his anger out on me. The man loathed me. Scarred my body in more than one way.
He’d been dead a long time, and at my hands, but I’d never forgiven him.
He’d been the one to kick us out and had taught my mother fear and subservience. She’d suffered at the hands of the mayor for far longer than she should’ve tolerated it.
To this day, I still wasn’t sure what made her leave.
Either way, Everly and I had been next. I’d packed up. Went to her room and knocked to find her on the bed, hands in her lap.
“Why did ye say no, Everly?” I asked quietly into the still air of my bedroom.
The sleeping woman didn’t reply.
Hurt and anger rippled under my skin. I took a step. “Why did ye choose him over me?”
I reached the side of the bed, standing over her. With no bidding, my knife was in my hand.
“Why cling to that man, when ye said you’d love me until your last breath?”
So slowly, I peeled back the white sheet, revealing her pale skin and that white camisole. Her pulse fluttered at her throat.
She’d stolen a pair of my fucking boxer shorts to sleep in, and at the sight, an urge to claim her ran rampant through my system. I reached for the hem of her top. Twisted it in my fist. With a flick of my blade, I sliced it in two. Her round tits were revealed, her rosy nipples hardening in the cooler air.
My weapon was on the bed and my dick in my hand with me barely noticing what I was doing. I stroked myself, using her body as my inspiration. Fury at her decision spurred me on to get faster, to work myself from root to tip.
I tugged on my Prince Albert piercing, imagining her tongue sliding around it.
If I wanted, I could throw the blankets all the way off and shred Everly’s shorts, revealing her cunt to me, too. I could be inside her again and waking her up with a hard fuck that would replace her memories of the single other time we’d done it.
I bit down on a groan, forcing myself to keep those thoughts at bay. I wanted her to say yes to me every time and never refuse me again.
I wanted history to unwrite itself and my fucking heart to unbreak.
In my grip, I swelled all the more, and I breathed through my nose, the start of an orgasm gripping me tight. I changed my focus to the head of my dick and its piercing only and sucked in air, my balls tightening in warning.
My cum shot over Everly’s tits. I didn’t care where it fell. The climax knocked my brain out so it took several seconds to come back to earth, and I braced myself on the bedframe, breathing hard.
Somehow, she was still asleep.
I almost wished she’d woken to see my act.
Grabbing the sheet, I tugged it over her so the cooling cum didn’t wake her. Then I returned to work, hating myself, but lighter than I’d felt in months.